Student will complete the Entry Ticket: Correlation and Causation where they have to interpret a cartoon and explain the joke. The joke focuses on the distinction between causation and correlation (ID.C-9) but also allows every student to give an answer in explaining the joke without necessarily knowing mathematical terminology or concepts.

Students will also be asked to generate their own joke that utilizes a similar underlying humor. The entry ticket should get students interested in what the lesson for the day will be about.

Interdisciplinary content area(s): This lesson taps into content in science through examples of daily temperature and a research summary. The lesson also integrates aspects of ELA, primarily asking students to write a complex and complete paragraph recapping the important aspects of the lesson.

Academic Vocabulary:

Correlation – when two variables are related, but don’t necessarily cause the change.

Causation – when one variable causes a change in another variable

*Note: place academic vocabulary on word wall as a strategy to assist students in learning academic vocabulary.

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Resources

After the entry ticket, the teacher will review a Powerpoint presentation (PowerPoint Slides: Correlation and Causation)comparing and contrasting the concepts of correlation and causation. As part of the lesson students complete two different Turn and Talks (see strategy folder for more information). One prompt asks students to interpret a graph on daily temperatures to identify correlations and causations in the data. The second turn and talk has students translate a table of values into a scatterplot and analyze the relationship between the two variables, which is highly associated with standard ID-B.6.

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Resources

After the lecture and turn and talks, the class turns to a small group activity – students read a brief article that summarizes research and complete the Class Activity: Correlation and Causation activity.

In groups they identify different correlations and causations that are implied in the article. Each group will write down the correlations and causations they identified along with a justification/explanation of their thinking and put their findings on the whiteboards in class. For more information on the math practice standard MP.3 about creating arguments and critiquing those of other see my strategy folder. Each group will then present their findings to the class.

For this section, I suggest having students discuss whether their results of their research question will be a correlation or a causal one for their group project. The project assignment sheet is here: Project: Our City Statistics Assignment Sheet. Students can still write about this distinction if they have not completed the data collection or analysis section of the project.

As long as they know the methods they did/will do and the research question, they should be able to identify whether the results will suggest a correlation or a causal relationship.